What’s been the highlight of your holiday?

Who’s The Daddy

If you’re really lucky, there’s a moment on a family holiday that makes all the money and travel melt away.

It might be making a long line of sandcastles with your young children. It might be an early morning walk on a deserted beach with your partner. It might be watching your team win their first game of the season from the comfort of an air conditioned bar.

Whatever floats your boat. It’s your holiday, you’ve paid for it and it’s yours to enjoy how you see fit.

Our teenage daughters would have spent theirs in our holiday flat in St Ives peering into their mobile phones if we’d let them.

But we crowbarred them out of their pits at the mutually agreed time of noon every day so we could all enjoy some of the most beautiful beaches in the world about five minutes from our front door whether we all wanted to or not.

The highlight for yours truly was a family dinner at one of the country’s best restaurants which has an outdoor terrace overlooking the beautiful beach and the stunning sea and we ate and drank our fill as the sun dipped into it.

The bill, as the joke goes, was big enough to be called William.

But pan fried sea bass on a bed of pea risotto doesn’t pay for itself. And neither does fish and chips at £15 a pop.

The kids had been pre-warned, twice, not to moan or pull a face because this restaurant was on their dad’s bucket list.

They didn’t. Turns out they quite like £15 fish and chips in beachside restaurants.

We are only too aware time is running out for our family holidays. Daughter #1 finishes big school next summer and proudly announced this was the last time she’d be coming away with us, as the boss blinked back tears.

She quite fancies a fortnight in Ibiza with her friends followed by a weekend of hedonism at T In The Park in Scotland as a reward for doing her GCSEs. All paid for by me. Let me say here and now that is NOT happening.

And her protest of “Yeah but I’ll be nearly 17 by then” made the blood drain from our horrified faces. Absolutely no chance.